Autism Watch: Your Scientific Guide to Autism

Searching through the web I found Autism Watch: Your Scientific Guide to Autism, edited by Dr. James Laidler (MD). Though it hasn't been updated since May 05, it has some interesting and informative links.

For an idea of Dr. Laidler's motivations, read My Involvement with Autism Quackery, which begins:

Ever since I began the Herculean (some might say Quixotic) task of exposing the quackery and pseudoscience surrounding autism, I have had people ask me, “Are you the same Jim Laidler who used to talk about chelation at autism conferences?” To them, the idea that I could once have been an impassioned supporter of the very thing I am now trying to debunk is hard to fathom. Well, everyone has something in their past that they are embarrassed about—and that is mine.

I consider myself to be a very scientific person. While growing up, I was skeptical and inquiring and naturally gravitated to the sciences. My first brushes with pseudoscience and quackery in medical school left me convinced that “it could never happen to me.” I was sure that my background and training would keep me from making the same mistake as “those people.” I was wrong.

A year or so after my son was diagnosed with autism, with no hope for cure in sight, I was feeling desperate for anything that might help him. My wife attended a conference about “biological treatments for autism.” She came back extremely excited, having heard story after story about “hopeless” cases of autism “cured” by a variety of simple treatments. I was initially skeptical, but my desperation soon got the better of me. We started out with the simple therapies—vitamins and minerals—but soon moved on to the “hard stuff': the gluten- and casein-free diet, secretin, and chelation. Some of it seemed to work—for a while—and that just spurred us to try the next therapy on the horizon. I was “hooked” on hope, which is more addictive and dangerous than any “street” drug. Meanwhile, my second son developed an autism-like disability at the age of 18 months.